Eddie O'Sullivan tells Keith Duggan why it is important to keep your head when all others are losing theirs

Ahascragh is like the bell for the final lap. When Eddie O'Sullivan reaches the east Galway village late at night, with its broad, handsome square bordered by the dimly lit terrace houses, he knows he is close to home. Although he is exact about most things, Eddie could not possibly guess how often he has travelled this road from Dublin long after midnight, alone with the radio and thoughts of rugby. Many hundreds, anyway.

As he prepares for the first international rugby season in recent memory in which Ireland are being spoken of as leading championship contenders, many of the low fields in the west are waterlogged.

Clear, cold nights driving through the saturated countryside are as good a way as any to keep the mind sharp as he considers the infinite number of things that could go perfectly right or completely wrong. Soon, the Irish squad will meet and, in effect, go into a retreat, so Eddie's leisure days at home are numbered.

After several negotiations, we finally met in a diner on the edge of Tuam on one of those typically west of Ireland winter days: drenched and buffeted, petrol attendants cowering in the wind and rain, café windows fogged and shining. This was one of Eddie's rare down days. Rugby free - except for his thoughts. A pleasant hour passed pumping steel in the local gym, during hours when you get a free run through all the weights.

Tuam was slightly manic, as all provincial towns are on those wet lunchtime hours when everyone kicks into motion, but Eddie arrived in the café bang on schedule, ghosting through the noontime rush. He sipped a coffee and, demonstrating the famous O'Sullivan discipline, he resisted the plate of malnourished buns which represented the extent of The Irish Times' largesse. Eddie drank coffee and he talked about rugby, his life work.

Because of the afterglow of last season's celebrations, you half expected Eddie O'Sullivan to be in reflective mood and sit back and ponder a job well done, as if it were all over. Except, for O'Sullivan, it is not like that. Nothing is finished. He was privileged to join the ranks of Manager of the Year and delighted in the public reaction to the Triple Crown, but even as he relived the many moments of talk shows, he was mentally tuning his mind towards the now.

The past couple of months have been a slow-burning interlude, days spent at meetings and in preparation and also just drumming his fingers. It was dangerous in a way because, nominally, even international rugby men treat Christmas as a holiday and he has always loved the season, still a traditional and family-orientated week where he lives in Moylough.

But since he became Irish manager, he demanded of himself that he keep on going. Mass and dinner with the family, of course, but then business as usual. December turning to January was no time to shine laurels. He can remember driving to Dublin on Christmas night a couple of years back. He was due to watch Wasps against London Irish on St Stephen's Day in London and the roads were icy, so he didn't want to chance a morning drive to Dublin for an 8 a.m. flight.

So he headed off across the twinkling midlands on a night when the roads belonged just to him. Fanatical, some would say. Just doing his job, he would reply. This year, it was the same. He was back on the beat for the Celtic League games on December 27th, building slowly and deliberately towards this moment. Since then the beat from home to the strongholds of European rugby has been constant.

In a way, we should expect nothing less from O'Sullivan. The Corkman's journey to the pinnacle of Irish sport has been well documented now and is, of course, a story of perpetual motion. O'Sullivan was a wanderer who thought nothing of extreme journeys - from driving from Monivea to Blackrock after school to spending summers at coaching clinics all over the United States - in pursuit of a better understanding of rugby.

Now that he has arrived, now that he is the man in possession, he stays loyal to old habits. If he has one great fear, it is that his grasp of the game might escape him. His belief on rugby is simple. He thinks the game is, from a coaching perspective, a frontier awaiting exploration. Read anything that O'Sullivan ever said and it is clear that he formed his thoughts on the sport early and has not deviated from those principals while at the same time continually learning, learning, learning.

"I think there is a paradigm shift in rugby," he says at one point. "When I played in the 1980s it was an amateur game. Some of the sessions we did back then were asinine. We did a lot of unopposed work. And we were brilliant at it - we could score tries from our own goal-line. It sounds funny now, but that was the way of it. When I began teaching girl's basketball in Holy Rosary, Mountbellew, I was immediately struck by the input the coach has. And all the defensive zones and offensive patterns that were standard.

"I worked with Gerry Nihill and Enda Byrt a lot and I saw pretty quickly that basketball coaching was just miles ahead. We won our Schools All-Ireland in 1983 and I got involved with the Irish under-18 boys team, so I saw the influence that quality coaching could have on a team. There were aspects to that in rugby, but there was no blueprint.

"What professionalism did was force that mindset onto the game, and everyone started building systems. So the great thing about rugby - we were at a Lions meeting in London recently and (Clive) Woodward was saying this, which I agree with - this is an incredible time for the game because it is progressing at breakneck speed. If you stop coaching for six months, less even, oh Lord, you are in trouble."

PERHAPS EVERYTHING we need to know about O'Sullivan - or certainly as much as he believes we need know - is contained in those observations. In some filing cabinet in Holy Rosary school, there lies a team photograph of that long disbanded basketball team with big 1980s hair and plain sneakers and Eddie standing on the edge, younger and just as intense. The important thing is that he knew what was what back then and therefore it seems natural that he should link a faded, 20-year-old Schools achievement to a meeting with the brain trust of the looming Lions tour of New Zealand.

And it is fascinating to picture O'Sullivan quietly and efficiently working on his repertoire as far back as the early 1980s, the silken era of Ollie Campbell, stealthily gaining knowledge and influence through the several farcical periods in Irish rugby which would follow.

It is also somewhat shocking to consider that O'Sullivan is now entering his third Six Nations as Irish coach. He is not like the previous men. None of Doyler's glint and charm, none of Jimmy Davidson's beatific enthusiasm nor Noisy Murphy's plea for patience, none of Brian Ashton's blunt promises nor even Warren Gatland's heartbreaking expressions when things were not going well. For a long time, it seemed as if the post of Irish manager was one of public property, there to be torn apart.

O'Sullivan, without so much as raising his voice, has managed to place it at a remove again. That has been partly down to his guarded personality and partly down to the impressive results; but mainly it is down to what we see when we watch Eddie on television. Or rather, what we don't. As a country, we like to lose ourselves in the fervour of patriotic sporting events. Eddie sits in the stand and doesn't even get involved.

Girvan Dempsey's try in Twickenham was one of those rarefied instances of melodramatic euphoria, one of those moments in sport that registered across the entire country and seemed to call for the Irish coach to do a little jig in the very heart of the fortress, à la Woodward. Something loveable: Charltonesque. But Eddie stayed seated and impassive, like a man listening to the Sunday sermon.

"Not that I didn't want to jump up and down. But your first thought was - this is a key moment. The smart thing now isto make sure we have a plan for the next three minutes and to get that information onto the field. You are at your most vulnerable after a score. So, strangely enough, even when Ronan (O'Gara) dropped the goal against Argentina (in November) I was probably the only person sitting down. There was a monitor in front of me and I could see Ronan running back and shouting at the forwards, so I knew he was thinking along the same lines as me. Like, I am deeply passionate about rugby, but if you allow your emotions to control you, the odds are you won't make clear-cut decisions. And it is a hard thing to do. But after Ireland scores, you are still working. That is what it comes down to."

That suppression of - or divorce from - emotion is key to O'Sullivan. In a way, it seems contradictory. During his time coaching the United States team with George Hook, he immersed himself in the American coaching philosophy and methodology. But where as many of the deities of that universe wear their hearts of their sleeve, sounding at times like evangelists for love and family, O'Sullivan prefers to compare his running of the Irish team to a "business model". The highs and lows of dramatic encounters are a privilege reserved for the fans.

O'Sullivan invests his faith in preparation, execution and percentages. The Dempsey try, for instance, was probably practised around 40 times before that game - at walking pace, at three-quarter pace, against a pressure defence, from both sides of the field. And every sequence was filmed so the squad could study where the move was failing that night.

"You spend hours, hours running these plays, and if 10 per cent come off you might win a game. For instance, against South Africa, we ran a brilliant move and Denis Hickie was in for a clear try, but the pass was called forward. The reason for that was that the ball bobbled in front of Shane Horgan for a split second. And that was it gone."

Coaching, framing his vision of the game on his players on the training field and watching that come to fruition in the roaring arenas is what O'Sullivan loves. Everything else is a chore to him. And yet he has come to prominence at a time when the cult of the manager is everything. Although he is professional and courteous, some part of him refuses to bow to contemporary fashion for the sports "personality".

IN THE CAFÉ the day we met, two men approached him to seek his autograph - "I'll be in the good books when I come home with this, Eddie" - and O'Sullivan was as pleasant as could be. But no matter how many slips of paper he signs, he will never get used to it. Part of that is down to his background, as the classic outsider who kept banging on the gilded door of Irish rugby until it opened. A Youghal boy, he made it as a Garryowen and Munster winger without tasting from the silver spoon of the ancient Irish rugby system.

"I had no pedigree," he says simply.

Maybe subconsciously he was grooming himself for one day becoming the Ireland manager, but he probably never paused to consider himself as a public figure. He probably never practised signing his name.

"It's something I will always find strange," he confesses. "Like, I would never say no,

but I suppose I am not fully comfortable.

But look, I know well the day will come

as well when there will be nobody asking

for my autograph."

It is one of the reasons why he enjoys the relative seclusion of life in east Galway. He has been a part of that community for a long time, coaching rugby in Monivea and competing in a county football final with Mountbellew against Annaghdown as far back as 1983. "I played top of the left. We lost."

His children, Katie and Barry, enjoyed their childhood there, and even in the slightly crazy days when Eddie spent long hot summers traipsing the United States, knowing that Noreen and the kids were happy in Moylough was a small comfort. These days when he is home, he tends to stay in and spend time with the family, although occasionally he calls up to an old friend, a local farmer, for a beer. It is a part of his life he as always been protective of.

After the Twickenham game last year, he was back in the local church for his son's confirmation on Sunday morning, and a photograph of the occasion made it on to the front page of some of the national pages on Monday morning. It felt like an invasion to O'Sullivan. He had posed for all the photographs in the world in London the previous afternoon. This was a family moment, a community moment. Splashing it across in newsprint . . . he didn't understand the need for it then and cannot now. "I am guarded about things like that," he admits. "And I reckon most people would be the same."

Deep down, he knows it boils down to the incessant demand for more information on those who fill the sporting headlines. Now that Eddie is taking us places, we yearn to feel like we know him. We yearn to see his delight, to wink and tell us we are great. And it is not that he refuses to do that, it simply never occurs to him. There was a photograph by Billy Stickland taken on Ireland's tour of New Zealand two summers ago that was at odds with O'Sullivan's exterior demeanour. He was pictured aiming a fun karate kick at Keith Wood, japing around. He laughed at the memory.

"Woody was a fierce man for messing around, coming up behind you and headlocking you or something. We were in Dunedin that day and the weather was terrible, there was no place to go. I think I was standing at the snack bar and Woody started coming at me so, yeah, I was doing these karate kicks and Billy started snapping."

The thing is, when O'Sullivan can permit himself to switch off he wants for nothing more than to blend into the gang. He readily admits that he cares for the players he works with on the Irish team. He says he enjoys the camaraderie, wishes he had the opportunity they have to play professional sport and constantly emphasises that he is full of admiration for the hours, the untold hours, they put into their craft. And that he frets for them. He was watching Brian O'Driscoll one evening on Tubridy Tonight and the Irish captain expressed the hope that he might continue to play for another five years, if his body could take the punishment.

"Brian, he is 25," marvels O'Sullivan. "It's over in a flash. To look at it in a negative light, his career is half over - if he is lucky. When it is over, it is over like that."

THIS, WHEN everything else is stripped away, is what motivates O'Sullivan. He has the athlete's born fear of time. You cannot ever understand the brevity of your shining moment until it passes. O'Sullivan remembers clearly the day the reaper called time on him. It was, funnily enough, at Christmas time - 1989. He was running on the wing with Corinthians and playing a GOAL challenge match. Loads of open ball and it was good fun.

"But you know, for a time when I was at the peak of my game with Garryowen, it felt fantastic to be out there and I would have run through a brick wall for the sniff of a try. That day, I knew. I wasn't getting any better. You know in your heart of hearts when you are getting too old for this caper. I didn't want to hang around and I just stopped, I never went back. And I never regretted that."

He was lucky in that his natural flair for coaching just replaced the thrill of playing the game. But that deep awareness that they are all just passing through a tradition is something he constantly reminds his Irish players about. In the documentary he made for RTÉ television recently, he alluded to it.

On plane journeys or late at night in the squad hotels, he immerses himself in sports books - psychology, biographies, John Feinstein's fly-on-the-wall revelations - to relax, but also to find a different perspective on the essential privilege and strangeness that is the life of the elite sportsman. He has come to know Brian Kerr and Padraig Harrington, men he deeply admires, and their conversations confirmed what he always felt - that the same guiding principles run through all sport.

What he loves about Harrington is the patience that defines his game and that consistency - the most taken for granted aspect in all the sporting repertoire - under stunning, incomprehensible pressure. Hemingway's old definition of courage holds true in Eddie O'Sullivan's philosophy of sport. Behind the relentless attention to detail and the repetition - O'Sullivan is one of those coaches whose, "okay, let's do it one last time" never means one last time - is the simple question that he believes binds this Irish team.

"How do I want to be remembered," he says quietly. "That is a pretty sobering thought to carry with you. Because the day will come when you just won't be named on another Irish team. The day will come when I won't pick another Irish rugby team. And it will be over. People will look back then and evaluate, and so it comes down to, what do you want to be remembered as?"

O'Sullivan is 46. When his contract ends after the next World Cup - "if I get that far" - he will be 50. Then he will allow himself to take stock, to assess if he has reached his plateau as a coach. The Lions tour this summer offers him the chance to run his attacking systems with perhaps the best three-quarters line in the world. It is something like his idea of heaven, but it can wait. As soon as last year's November internationals concluded, his mind itched and craved to begin working on the Six Nations. He had a million and one things to consider, to devise and say. Big promises are not his style and so there is not much bold talk about defending the Triple Crown or marching on for the Grand Slam.

But we can be sure that putting the mechanisms in place to make that feat reasonable is what is pre-occupying him now, this very weekend with the Six Nations rumour mill at full output.

"Last year was good, but I don't dwell on it," he said that day, leaning forward to speak through the lunchtime din. "You get a good feeling when you think about the Triple Crown and our recent form. It gives you a bit of confidence. But you want to build on it now and see where we can go in the Six Nations. It is about dealing with the pressure which comes with the expectation of winning. Which, I suppose, beats the hell out of the expectation of losing."

He has reached the point where he is firmly in control. In his first years, he spent his idle hours secretly worrying if the nature of the job, with its fickle tradition of loyalty, would give him time to leave his imprint on the Irish team. He felt that he was unfairly attacked in the weeks after Warren Gatland departed and, as ever, opinion on the best direction for Irish rugby seemed wildly emotional.

Eddie's great trick was to restore calm and then slowly and deliberately inculcate the team and the public with the sense that the bluff old stereotypes of Irish rugby - the blood and passion - were locked into a chill and deliberate and sophisticated rugby philosophy. Now, on the verge of his third season, the hysteria of yesteryear seems slightly comical.

"In sport I remind myself of the one point theory. You are judged on that one point principal on an on-going basis. But the truth is you cannot live in a world where if you win by a point all is right and if you lose all is wrong. You have to find that balance. It is like this: irugby, if you make 90 per cent of your tackles you are in with a chance. In Paris last year we missed three tackles that I remember and they scored three tries.

"The fact is that at the top, if you make one mistake, the big guys will ice you. We are trying to put ourselves in that department, to make very few mistakes and to punish others for theirs. That is what we are aiming for."

And so he rolls on, into the third season. But even perfectionists make the occasional mistake. When he left to drive home through the east Galway back roads, it was terrible out, grey and lashing. and the man who they say prepares for everything had no raincoat. So he made a dash for it in a light sweatshirt through the gloom and puddles, still a young Garryowen winger deep in his soul, dodging and weaving his way through a car park in Tuam. Someone in a car turning in towards the cafe began flashing his headlights.

"Was that Eddie O'Sullivan?" he shouted excitedly, rolling down his window and peering after the disappearing figure. And he grinned widely through the heavy rain as he realised it was Eddie all right, moving quickly towards the next place.

Ahascragh is like the bell for the final lap. When Eddie O'Sullivan reaches the east Galway village late at night, with its broad, handsome square bordered by the dimly lit terrace houses, he knows he is close to home. Although he is exact about most things, Eddie could not possibly guess how often he has travelled this road from Dublin long after midnight, alone with the radio and thoughts of rugby. Many hundreds, anyway.

As he prepares for the first international rugby season in recent memory in which Ireland are being spoken of as leading championship contenders, many of the low fields in the west are waterlogged.

Clear, cold nights driving through the saturated countryside are as good a way as any to keep the mind sharp as he considers the infinite number of things that could go perfectly right or completely wrong. Soon, the Irish squad will meet and, in effect, go into a retreat, so Eddie's leisure days at home are numbered.

After several negotiations, we finally met in a diner on the edge of Tuam on one of those typically west of Ireland winter days: drenched and buffeted, petrol attendants cowering in the wind and rain, café windows fogged and shining. This was one of Eddie's rare down days. Rugby free - except for his thoughts. A pleasant hour passed pumping steel in the local gym, during hours when you get a free run through all the weights.

Tuam was slightly manic, as all provincial towns are on those wet lunchtime hours when everyone kicks into motion, but Eddie arrived in the café bang on schedule, ghosting through the noontime rush. He sipped a coffee and, demonstrating the famous O'Sullivan discipline, he resisted the plate of malnourished buns which represented the extent of The Irish Times' largesse. Eddie drank coffee and he talked about rugby, his life work.

Because of the afterglow of last season's celebrations, you half expected Eddie O'Sullivan to be in reflective mood and sit back and ponder a job well done, as if it were all over. Except, for O'Sullivan, it is not like that. Nothing is finished. He was privileged to join the ranks of Manager of the Year and delighted in the public reaction to the Triple Crown, but even as he relived the many moments of talk shows, he was mentally tuning his mind towards the now.

The past couple of months have been a slow-burning interlude, days spent at meetings and in preparation and also just drumming his fingers. It was dangerous in a way because, nominally, even international rugby men treat Christmas as a holiday and he has always loved the season, still a traditional and family-orientated week where he lives in Moylough.

But since he became Irish manager, he demanded of himself that he keep on going. Mass and dinner with the family, of course, but then business as usual. December turning to January was no time to shine laurels. He can remember driving to Dublin on Christmas night a couple of years back. He was due to watch Wasps against London Irish on St Stephen's Day in London and the roads were icy, so he didn't want to chance a morning drive to Dublin for an 8 a.m. flight.

So he headed off across the twinkling midlands on a night when the roads belonged just to him. Fanatical, some would say. Just doing his job, he would reply. This year, it was the same. He was back on the beat for the Celtic League games on December 27th, building slowly and deliberately towards this moment. Since then the beat from home to the strongholds of European rugby has been constant.

In a way, we should expect nothing less from O'Sullivan. The Corkman's journey to the pinnacle of Irish sport has been well documented now and is, of course, a story of perpetual motion. O'Sullivan was a wanderer who thought nothing of extreme journeys - from driving from Monivea to Blackrock after school to spending summers at coaching clinics all over the United States - in pursuit of a better understanding of rugby.

Now that he has arrived, now that he is the man in possession, he stays loyal to old habits. If he has one great fear, it is that his grasp of the game might escape him. His belief on rugby is simple. He thinks the game is, from a coaching perspective, a frontier awaiting exploration. Read anything that O'Sullivan ever said and it is clear that he formed his thoughts on the sport early and has not deviated from those principals while at the same time continually learning, learning, learning.

"I think there is a paradigm shift in rugby," he says at one point. "When I played in the 1980s it was an amateur game. Some of the sessions we did back then were asinine. We did a lot of unopposed work. And we were brilliant at it - we could score tries from our own goal-line. It sounds funny now, but that was the way of it. When I began teaching girl's basketball in Holy Rosary, Mountbellew, I was immediately struck by the input the coach has. And all the defensive zones and offensive patterns that were standard.

"I worked with Gerry Nihill and Enda Byrt a lot and I saw pretty quickly that basketball coaching was just miles ahead. We won our Schools All-Ireland in 1983 and I got involved with the Irish under-18 boys team, so I saw the influence that quality coaching could have on a team. There were aspects to that in rugby, but there was no blueprint.

"What professionalism did was force that mindset onto the game, and everyone started building systems. So the great thing about rugby - we were at a Lions meeting in London recently and (Clive) Woodward was saying this, which I agree with - this is an incredible time for the game because it is progressing at breakneck speed. If you stop coaching for six months, less even, oh Lord, you are in trouble."

PERHAPS EVERYTHING we need to know about O'Sullivan - or certainly as much as he believes we need know - is contained in those observations. In some filing cabinet in Holy Rosary school, there lies a team photograph of that long disbanded basketball team with big 1980s hair and plain sneakers and Eddie standing on the edge, younger and just as intense. The important thing is that he knew what was what back then and therefore it seems natural that he should link a faded, 20-year-old Schools achievement to a meeting with the brain trust of the looming Lions tour of New Zealand.

And it is fascinating to picture O'Sullivan quietly and efficiently working on his repertoire as far back as the early 1980s, the silken era of Ollie Campbell, stealthily gaining knowledge and influence through the several farcical periods in Irish rugby which would follow.

It is also somewhat shocking to consider that O'Sullivan is now entering his third Six Nations as Irish coach. He is not like the previous men. None of Doyler's glint and charm, none of Jimmy Davidson's beatific enthusiasm nor Noisy Murphy's plea for patience, none of Brian Ashton's blunt promises nor even Warren Gatland's heartbreaking expressions when things were not going well. For a long time, it seemed as if the post of Irish manager was one of public property, there to be torn apart.

O'Sullivan, without so much as raising his voice, has managed to place it at a remove again. That has been partly down to his guarded personality and partly down to the impressive results; but mainly it is down to what we see when we watch Eddie on television. Or rather, what we don't. As a country, we like to lose ourselves in the fervour of patriotic sporting events. Eddie sits in the stand and doesn't even get involved.

Girvan Dempsey's try in Twickenham was one of those rarefied instances of melodramatic euphoria, one of those moments in sport that registered across the entire country and seemed to call for the Irish coach to do a little jig in the very heart of the fortress, à la Woodward. Something loveable: Charltonesque. But Eddie stayed seated and impassive, like a man listening to the Sunday sermon.

"Not that I didn't want to jump up and down. But your first thought was - this is a key moment. The smart thing now is to make sure we have a plan for the next three minutes and to get that information onto the field. You are at your most vulnerable after a score. So, strangely enough, even when Ronan (O'Gara) dropped the goal against Argentina (in November) I was probably the only person sitting down. There was a monitor in front of me and I could see Ronan running back and shouting at the forwards, so I knew he was thinking along the same lines as me. Like, I am deeply passionate about rugby, but if you allow your emotions to control you, the odds are you won't make clear-cut decisions. And it is a hard thing to do. But after Ireland scores, you are still working. That is what it comes down to."

That suppression of - or divorce from - emotion is key to O'Sullivan. In a way, it seems contradictory. During his time coaching the United States team with George Hook, he immersed himself in the American coaching philosophy and methodology. But where as many of the deities of that universe wear their hearts of their sleeve, sounding at times like evangelists for love and family, O'Sullivan prefers to compare his running of the Irish team to a "business model". The highs and lows of dramatic encounters are a privilege reserved for the fans.

O'Sullivan invests his faith in preparation, execution and percentages. The Dempsey try, for instance, was probably practised around 40 times before that game - at walking pace, at three-quarter pace, against a pressure defence, from both sides of the field. And every sequence was filmed so the squad could study where the move was failing that night.

"You spend hours, hours running these plays, and if 10 per cent come off you might win a game. For instance, against South Africa, we ran a brilliant move and Denis Hickie was in for a clear try, but the pass was called forward. The reason for that was that the ball bobbled in front of Shane Horgan for a split second. And that was it gone."

Coaching, framing his vision of the game on his players on the training field and watching that come to fruition in the roaring arenas is what O'Sullivan loves. Everything else is a chore to him. And yet he has come to prominence at a time when the cult of the manager is everything. Although he is professional and courteous, some part of him refuses to bow to contemporary fashion for the sports "personality".

IN THE CAFÉ the day we met, two men approached him to seek his autograph - "I'll be in the good books when I come home with this, Eddie" - and O'Sullivan was as pleasant as could be. But no matter how many slips of paper he signs, he will never get used to it. Part of that is down to his background, as the classic outsider who kept banging on the gilded door of Irish rugby until it opened. A Youghal boy, he made it as a Garryowen and Munster winger without tasting from the silver spoon of the ancient Irish rugby system.

"I had no pedigree," he says simply.

Maybe subconsciously he was grooming himself for one day becoming the Ireland manager, but he probably never paused to consider himself as a public figure. He probably never practised signing his name.

"It's something I will always find strange," he confesses. "Like, I would never say no,

but I suppose I am not fully comfortable.

But look, I know well the day will come

as well when there will be nobody asking

for my autograph."

It is one of the reasons why he enjoys the relative seclusion of life in east Galway. He has been a part of that community for a long time, coaching rugby in Monivea and competing in a county football final with Mountbellew against Annaghdown as far back as 1983. "I played top of the left. We lost."

His children, Katie and Barry, enjoyed their childhood there, and even in the slightly crazy days when Eddie spent long hot summers traipsing the United States, knowing that Noreen and the kidswere happy in Moylough was a small comfort. These days when he is home, he tends to stay in and spend time with the family, although occasionally he calls up to an old friend, a local farmer, for a beer. It is a part of his life he as always been protective of.

After the Twickenham game last year, he was back in the local church for his son's confirmation on Sunday morning, and a photograph of the occasion made it on to the front page of some of the national pages on Monday morning. It felt like an invasion to O'Sullivan. He had posed for all the photographs in the world in London the previous afternoon. This was a family moment, a community moment. Splashing it across in newsprint . . . he didn't understand the need for it then and cannot now. "I am guarded about things like that," he admits. "And I reckon most people would be the same."

Deep down, he knows it boils down to the incessant demand for more information on those who fill the sporting headlines. Now that Eddie is taking us places, we yearn to feel like we know him. We yearn to see his delight, to wink and tell us we are great. And it is not that he refuses to do that, it simply never occurs to him. There was a photograph by Billy Stickland taken on Ireland's tour of New Zealand two summers ago that was at odds with O'Sullivan's exterior demeanour. He was pictured aiming a fun karate kick at Keith Wood, japing around. He laughed at the memory.

"Woody was a fierce man for messing around, coming up behind you and headlocking you or something. We were in Dunedin that day and the weather was terrible, there was no place to go. I think I was standing at the snack bar and Woody started coming at me so, yeah, I was doing these karate kicks and Billy started snapping."

The thing is, when O'Sullivan can permit himself to switch off he wants for nothing more than to blend into the gang. He readily admits that he cares for the players he works with on the Irish team. He says he enjoys the camaraderie, wishes he had the opportunity they have to play professional sport and constantly emphasises that he is full of admiration for the hours, the untold hours, they put into their craft. And that he frets for them. He was watching Brian O'Driscoll one evening on Tubridy Tonight and the Irish captain expressed the hope that he might continue to play for another five years, if his body could take the punishment.

"Brian, he is 25," marvels O'Sullivan. "It's over in a flash. To look at it in a negative light, his career is half over - if he is lucky. When it is over, it is over like that."

THIS, WHEN everything else is stripped away, is what motivates O'Sullivan. He has the athlete's born fear of time. You cannot ever understand the brevity of your shining moment until it passes. O'Sullivan remembers clearly the day the reaper called time on him. It was, funnily enough, at Christmas time - 1989. He was running on the wing with Corinthians and playing a GOAL challenge match. Loads of open ball and it was good fun.

"But you know, for a time when I was at the peak of my game with Garryowen, it felt fantastic to be out there and I would have run through a brick wall for the sniff of a try. That day, I knew. I wasn't getting any better. You know in your heart of hearts when you are getting too old for this caper. I didn't want to hang around and I just stopped, I never went back. And I never regretted that."

He was lucky in that his natural flair for coaching just replaced the thrill of playing the game. But that deep awareness that they are all just passing through a tradition is something he constantly reminds his Irish players about. In the documentary he made for RTÉ television recently, he alluded to it.

On plane journeys or late at night in the squad hotels, he immerses himself in sports books - psychology, biographies, John Feinstein's fly-on-the-wall revelations - to relax, but also to find a different perspective on the essential privilege and strangeness that is the life of the elite sportsman. He has come to know Brian Kerr and Padraig Harrington, men he deeply admires, and their conversations confirmed what he always felt - that the same guiding principles run through all sport.

What he loves about Harrington is the patience that defines his game and that consistency - the most taken for granted aspect in all the sporting repertoire - under stunning, incomprehensible pressure. Hemingway's old definition of courage holds true in Eddie O'Sullivan's philosophy of sport. Behind the relentless attention to detail and the repetition - O'Sullivan is one of those coaches whose, "okay, let's do it one last time" never means one last time - is the simple question that he believes binds this Irish team.

"How do I want to be remembered," he says quietly. "That is a pretty sobering thought to carry with you. Because the day will come when you just won't be named on another Irish team. The day will come when I won't pick another Irish rugby team. And it will be over. People will look back then and evaluate, and so it comes down to, what do you want to be remembered as?"

O'Sullivan is 46. When his contract ends after the next World Cup - "if I get that far" - he will be 50. Then he will allow himself to take stock, to assess if he has reached his plateau as a coach. The Lions tour this summer offers him the chance to run his attacking systems with perhaps the best three-quarters line in the world. It is something like his idea of heaven, but it can wait. As soon as last year's November internationals concluded, his mind itched and craved to begin working on the Six Nations. He had a million and one things to consider, to devise and say. Big promises are not his style and so there is not much bold talk about defending the Triple Crown or marching on for the Grand Slam.

But we can be sure that putting the mechanisms in place to make that feat reasonable is what is pre-occupying him now, this very weekend with the Six Nations rumour mill at full output.

"Last year was good, but I don't dwell on it," he said that day, leaning forward to speak through the lunchtime din. "You get a good feeling when you think about the Triple Crown and our recent form. It gives you a bit of confidence. But you want to build on it now and see where we can go in the Six Nations. It is about dealing with the pressure which comes with the expectation of winning. Which, I suppose, beats the hell out of the expectation of losing."

He has reached the point where he is firmly in control. In his first years, he spent his idle hours secretly worrying if the nature of the job, with its fickle tradition of loyalty, would give him time to leave his imprint on the Irish team. He felt that he was unfairly attacked in the weeks after Warren Gatland departed and, as ever, opinion on the best direction for Irish rugby seemed wildly emotional.

Eddie's great trick was to restore calm and then slowly and deliberately inculcate the team and the public with the sense that the bluff old stereotypes of Irish rugby - the blood and passion - were locked into a chill and deliberate and sophisticated rugby philosophy. Now, on the verge of his third season, the hysteria of yesteryear seems slightly comical.

"In sport I remind myself of the one point theory. You are judged on that one point principal on an on-going basis. But the truth is you cannot live in a world where if you win by a point all is right and if you lose all is wrong. You have to find that balance. It is like this: irugby, if you make 90 per cent of your tackles you are in with a chance. In Paris last year we missed three tackles that I remember and they scored three tries.

"The fact is that at the top, if you make one mistake, the big guys will ice you. We are trying to put ourselves in that department, to make very few mistakes and to punish others for theirs. That is what we are aiming for."

And so he rolls on, into the third season. But even perfectionists make the occasional mistake. When he left to drive home through the east Galway back roads, it was terrible out, grey and lashing. and the man who they say prepares for everything had no raincoat. So he made a dash for it in a light sweatshirt through the gloom and puddles, still a young Garryowen winger deep in his soul, dodging and weaving his way through a car park in Tuam. Someone in a car turning in towards the cafe began flashing his headlights.

"Was that Eddie O'Sullivan?" he shouted excitedly, rolling down his window and peering after the disappearing figure. And he grinned widely through the heavy rain as he realised it was Eddie all right, moving quickly towards the next place.